Quote from: Jaeger on June 28, 2024, 05:53:31 PMs a counterpoint; The virtual evergreen popularity of the Star Wars RPG's. Which has very popular and beloved characters in it. (Original Trilogy...) And very thread bare setting info for GM's in the core books.

I would argue that if you are only pulling setting info from the original trilogy, that you can still run a fun and long campaign. (I've done it.)

Star Wars would be near the top of my list of settings that despite not being designed for roleplaying games, are pretty much perfect for it. At least until Disney got a hold of it, Star Wars was always framed as a universe in which any kind of adventure could be happening just off screen. Not only that, but it's a setting in which a DM can make up almost anything they want and have it fit plausibly in the universe.

That said, Star Wars is definitely a franchise in which the fans are as attached to the setting as they are the characters, if not moreso. The success of not only the RPG, but also the MMO, much of the EU, and the KOTOR games bears that out. Affinity for the setting was frequently cited by people as their reason for staying engaged with the franchise after being put off by the prequels. Anyway, barebones setting information in the RPG books doesn't matter much when there has always been tons of setting information for Star Wars available elsewhere. Didn't West End themselves publish literally dozens of sourcebooks for their Star Wars game?

Quote from: Jaeger on June 28, 2024, 05:53:31 PMI also don't think that the fantasy settings need to be overrun with fantastical races either.

Data released by the Baulders gate 3  people, and D&D beyond show that The human fighter is the reigning and defending champion of all times. For races it's Humans, then Elves/Half-Elves, then Dragonborne, then Tieflings, then dwarves, and everything beyond that as a kinda grab-bag.

While only two samples, I think it is not controversial to state that for a fantasy setting, you only really need 2-3 "non-human" races in your setting. And the overwhelming majority of the player base will be satisfied with the options.

Squeaky wheel gets the grease and all that. I think it's just the case that the players who don't care about player races will complain less about their inclusion than the the other group will complain if they are excluded. And of course more races to play makes for easy marketing copy.

I agree that you don't need buckets of player races to be a success, but for me at least, if you want to set yourself aside from D&D, it behooves you to not make the 2-3 you put in elves, dwarfs and halflings.

Quote from: Jaeger on June 28, 2024, 05:53:31 PMThe problem Blizzard had was that there is proportionally very little crossover of video game players to RPG players. It is almost always RPG players crossing over to video games. And RPG players already have D&D...

Blizzard also did not invest in the amount of support it would take for them to establish a market presence like Baizuo had which put them in place to benefit off of 4e's failures. From Blizzards POV; the ROI just wasn't there for them when they were already making billions...

Yeah, I didn't even know the WoW RPG existed. I went and found the pdf, and it's only slightly more high-effort than I would have guessed. There probably was never a world in which Blizzard cared enough to step into the tabletop market and seriously take on D&D. Even if they took all of D&D's marketshare in the late 00s, it would still have been small potatoes compared to what they were bringing in through videogames.

But I do think they could have. The younger generation of roleplayers in that time period did have a lot of crossover with Warcraft players (and videogamers generally), and the older generation was about to desert D&D in droves. WoW and Star Wars are probably the only other fantasy universes which have the potential breadth, and at one point had the economic and cultural clout that would make it possible to unseat D&D's primacy in the RPG market. In both cases, it would have taken a concerted effort from the owners of the IP and a significant cash investment, not just farming the license out to a small company for a few years. Clearly neither Blizzard nor Lucasfilm ever thought it worth the effort. Given what shit-brains the current iterations of Blizzard and Lucasfilm are, probably better they didn't.

Quote from: Orphan81 on June 25, 2024, 08:03:29 AMThis has been the argument from Millennial D&D players that joined for 5th edition.

The Orcs are supposedly "Black Coded" and this has been a baffling mystery to Gen X players. Orcs have never come across as Black Coded, where the hell are Millennials coming with this accusation?

Showing my age (I played AD&D 1st edition when the DMG first came out), but I have never heard the term Black Coded.  Probably because this is as close as I come to social media.

Quote from: Iconoclastic Tim on July 01, 2024, 03:28:07 PMShowing my age (I played AD&D 1st edition when the DMG first came out), but I have never heard the term Black Coded.  Probably because this is as close as I come to social media.

You are blessed and I envy you. But even as an Elder Millennial (Sometime called Xennial) I am already caught in the morass of social media and can never escape, even if I limit how much of it I take in.

That being said the whole 'coded' thing *CAN* be a useful device. There's arguments for things being "Queer" coded as well as "Black Coded" and other things.

It's like... Piccolo from Dragonball. He's a Green guy from another planet. But he's been adopted by black anime fans as he seems "Black" in demeanor... Hell I even thought that as a teenager watching Dragonball back in the 90s.

An example of "Queer Coding" is all the girls with the half shaved side of their head haircut.

The most popular race for Black Players in World of Warcraft *WAS* Orcs funny enough. If that's because Blizzard black coded them first with all the voice lines, dances, emotes and the like, or it came later is a chicken and egg situation..

But a couple years ago Millennial D&D 'players' started to try and argue Orcs have always been "Black Coded" and so having them be mean and brutish and violent is totally racist you guys, we swear!

Now I've been playing D&D since 2nd edition as a kid back in the 90s... I knew D&D orcs were VERY different from World of Warcaft Orcs..

So that's one of my theories on how Orcs ended up getting conflated as being 'coded black'. A lot of Millennial nerds played World of Warcraft *BEFORE* they ever got near Dungeons and Dragons. They brought all that baggage with them.

I hope that the reason why D&D is trying to make Orcs Latino now in their art is not in a desperate attempt to copy Dragon Ball Z's success in Latin America...
Most of you already know about the series' enduring popularity with African Americans.